Marshall V. King is a freelance writer and photographer who has worked in Elkhart County as a journalist for more than 20 years.

Like many employees, Weston Fribley had an idea for the company giving him a paycheck.

But when your employer is Amazon, the world’s largest retailer with more than half a million people working for it, you have to ask creatively.

Fribley, a 2007 Goshen High School graduate, has been a software engineer for Amazon for four years. He had been working remotely from September 2017 to May of this year in Goshen. He watched the flooding happen in his hometown in February.

When he went back to Seattle, the city was covered in a blanket of smoke from wildfires for several months.

“It seems like it’s going to be part of summer life in Seattle,” he said.

He believes the evidence that climate change is happening is clear and stark and wanted to do something, so he started looking for co-workers also wanting to do something. He found a group of people who had come up with the idea of asking Amazon to make a public plan to reduce dependence on fossil fuel and mitigate the company’s risks from climate change.